With increasing popularity of mobile voice and data communication, there is an ever increasing demand for high-speed data communication. Modern mobile terminals of a communication network, e.g. smartphones, have advanced processing capabilities. The mobile terminals can run a wide variety of applications. These applications include social networks, e-mail services, update clients such as news update centers or weather forecasts, without being limited thereto.
For battery powered terminals, power consumption is of significant importance in order to increase battery lifetime. For certain use cases, the total battery lifetime requirements may be challenging to meet. One exemplary scenario which imposes demanding battery lifetime requirements is machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.
To reduce modem power consumption, the mobile terminal may be set to different states. For illustration, 3GPP specification TS 25.331 V11.5.0 (2013-03) entitled “3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Radio Access Network; Radio Resource Control (RRC); Protocol specification (Release 11)” defines different RRC states in section 7.1. The mobile terminal may enter some of these states autonomously, e.g. when a timer expires. Traditionally, the various parameters which determine the RRC state of the mobile terminal or transitions between these states are controlled by a node of the communication network. These techniques may still not be adequate by themselves to address the power consumption problems and to meet the battery lifetime requirements of some use cases, e.g., M2M communication. For illustration, the mobile terminal may be caused to frequently make a transition from an idle mode in which it is RRC disconnected to an RRC connected mode, even when data rates are low and/or latency is large. The resulting processing activity reduces battery lifetime.